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Comment by NeverFade | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has started to remove books on political grounds as well: https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal

The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher, which holds the copyright, so you can still buy them used on Amazon... for $1,500+ per copy: https://www.wane.com/news/prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-book...

The reality is that these books will not be accessible to the vast majority of future American readers. This is just a fact at this point.

It doesn't even matter if Amazon keeps selling them, as the publisher banned them, so the number of (legal) copies will dwindle to zero. Also, with Amazon starting to ban books on similar political grounds, saying "but Amazon didn't ban this specific book (yet)" or "you can still get a copy at some obscure second-hand stores" is burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the reality of what is happening.

View on HN

Isn't this more of a matter of copyright and, specifically, the moral rights of authors and copyright holders to control their work? It's not that ebay is so offended—it's that Dr Seuss Enterprises doesn't want to lose billions due to a tarnished legacy. (Oops!) To me, this is just like a mature author that wants to stop the sale of an embarrassing early book because it was poorly written. In this case, the rightsholder thinks the early books are in poor taste and no longer wants them associated with the brand.

For the record, the same whitewashing (wokewashing?) happened to the Richard Scarry books which are all "abridged" because they were so offensively conservative about the role of women.

https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...

> the same whitewashing (wokewashing?) happened to the Richard Scarry books which are all "abridged"

Do you really have issues with the changes they made? They weren't abridged but just edited to show both sexes and different races doing jobs other than being maids and housewives. I'm not sure replacing milkman, fireman and cowboys with firefighters, gardeners and scientists is 'woke'

I don’t see an issue with an author updating their books with new editions.

I do have a problem if they ban the older editions.

Nobody has banned the older ones. The owner of them just wishes not to sell them, which the free market totally allows for.

The publisher and IP owner I understand. I don’t understand the used book market eBay and Amazon taking them off the real and virtual shelves.

> I do have a problem if they ban the older editions.

I don't see how they are "banned". Banning means "forbidden, disallowed, illegal". The older editions do not fall under any of the definitions. They are harder to get, because the author stopped selling them. You can still find them somewhere, and if you already have them you can keep them, they are just less convenient to acquire than they used to be.

Banned books of the week were also not banned. They actually often remained in print. The bs Ning was being done by busybodies who knew what was right for young children.

You’re trying too hard to defend the indefensible. eBay and Amazon stopped the used book market for these not just the publisher and rights holder.

According to your take no book has ever been banned in the US and people who complained about book banning were clutching pearls.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Your sentences literally don't make sense.

I don't see why used sales should be controlled in the same matter as new sales.

Discontinuing the printing is different than preventing sales of used copies.

You're approximately the first comment I've seen on this entire thread that actually noted the difference without hyperbole about banning books and censorship, thank you.

I'm with you; I don't think ebay should be forced to sell anything, but I think it was a bad decision to knee jerk ban auctions for the books in the news this week when they sell literal nazi medals.

I'm not angry with ebay, but I think they made a stupid choice and that they have highlighted how few alternative ways there are to purchase used books.

Upside is that it's good they are highlighting it now, finally. It's a very peculiar flex for them to decide to do, reselling books has a very long history of court cases saying the publisher cannot control the sale of an original purchased copy.

The bottom line is that books are being banned.

Sometimes it's because the copyright holders (which are not the authors) decided to stop publishing them for political reasons. This decision is all too easy to make when you are a massive copyright holder like Disney. The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.

In other cases, these book bans are executed by large book distributors, like Amazon: https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal. These are done very much against the wishes of the author, publisher, and copyright holder.

In still other cases, the book ban is enacted by a secondary market distributor, forcibly preventing one private legal owner of the work from selling it to another reader. This is what's happening here with eBay and the Dr. Seuss books.

This is a multi-pronged attack on the freedom to express and distribute ideas. And yes, it's all legal, much like the commissar control of all book publications under the Soviet regime.

Your use of the word “banned” here is telling, especially with your reference to the Soviets. The actual bottom line here is that this was a decision by capitalists under a capitalist system. This is the free market at work. People who own the intellectual rights to these books decided for themselves using their own free will to stop selling them. That’s just capitalism.

You say that eBay is preventing one private owner from selling to another private buyer, but what’s the alternative? To force eBay to facilitate the transaction? How is that freedom? The owner and buyer are still free to sell and buy this book, just not thorough eBay. If there is enough demand for this kind of transaction then the market will find a way to facilitate it. That’s capitalism.

I see your point, but the confounding factor for me is that the government granted a monopoly on these books through copyright. That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress art. In this case, I would advocate for terminating the copyright and letting it be distributed by whoever is willing to.

It's designed to promote science and the useful arts by giving artists control over their art. If I decide to create art, but I lose control over it once I decide I don't want to show it to anyone anymore, then that's not really control, is it?

My opinion is that copyright should be limited to the lifetime of the author, at which point it goes into public domain. In this particular case, that would mean the books would have been in the public domain for a long time now and there wouldn't be a controversy over this particular issue.

But the issue could still arise if the author were alive. Imagine Dr. Seuss were alive today and made this decision himself. It's the same controversy: person/entity with control over IP makes a decision on distribution of IP, people get upset. But that's the deal - you want to promote the useful arts by granting limited monopoly rights over art, then you better actually grant limited monopoly rights over art. That means the right to not publish the art.

>>That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress art.

Do you honestly believe you're "suppressing art" if you fail to force the rightful owners if said art to go against their own will and instead follow your orders and desires on what others should do with what's rightfully theirs?

It sounds an awful lot like your are not as much interested in anyone's freedom as you're interested in imposing your personal will into everyone around you.

So any big company that acquires copyright to any work can successfully ban the same and you would cheer their "right" to do so.

I will absolutely cheer your right to stop selling your IP. I may not cheer your _decision_ to do so, but that decision remains yours.

> In still other cases, the book ban is enacted by a secondary market distributor, forcibly preventing one private legal owner of the work from selling it to another reader. This is what's happening here with eBay and the Dr. Seuss books.

That's just not true. This was Random House Books' decision, not eBay or Amazon. The marketplaces are just following orders.

> The decision won’t affect Dr. Seuss’s best-known works, which publisher Random House Books for Young Readers and several booksellers on Tuesday said would remain available to customers.

> The review of the six books at issue was conducted last year by Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP, which oversees Dr. Seuss’s publishing interests and ancillary areas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-dr-seuss-books-are-dropped-...

> The marketplaces are just following orders.

First of all, hat-tip for using that chilling phrase in this unintentionally appropriate context.

Furthermore, eBay is a secondary market bookseller. As such, they facilitate legal sales of privately-owned books between individuals. They have absolutely no duty to "follow orders" by a publisher. In fact, publishers would shut down all secondary markets if they could - it would help their sales of new books.

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a publisher "ordered" eBay to stop selling the books, and such "order" would be invalid and ridiculous.

This is a decision by eBay to flex their corporate muscles to ban books they find politically disagreeable.

I am so comforted to hear that the marketplaces are “just following orders.” I know that no one following orders should ever be held accountable for the actions of their superiors. Really, things are good when people just follow orders.

Nothing bad has ever happened as long as everyone "just follows orders"!

Nuremberg intensifies

In your world view, what rights does the copyright holder have and not have?

Did google “ban” reader when they discontinued it?

The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their works. It may be reasonable for a rights-holder to restrict access to a work under certain circumstances - for example refusing to let neo-nazis play your music at a rally - because people might refuse to publish their works if they believed they couldn't stop that. Even a hiatus to distribution may be permissible if the rights-holder needs to be confident they can walk away from a distributor if they don't like the current distribution situation. However permanently and completely stopping distribution of a work breaks the social contract - society no longer gets what it payed for. The Seuss estate could put a big label on the front cover saying not for children, and a forward in every copy explaining why the content of the books is potentially problematic, but if they refuse to make the work available their right to exclusively control the work's availability should be rescinded.

> The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their works.

...and the people with the copyright to the book thought about it and decided they do not want to distribute their book.

Are they not entitled to decide for themselves what to do with what's theirs?

The purpose of copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is from the provision of the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to pass intellectual property legislation. Allowing for copyrighted works to be withdrawn from the public and made effectively unavailable to anybody for the remainder of a 95 year term does not promote scientific progress or useful arts as that effectively erases the work for the remainder of a lifetime. Nobody is entitled to use copyright laws against the constitutional purpose of copyright laws.

If somebody were to publish the 6 banned Seuss books and get sued by the estate, they'd be able to make a compelling legal argument that the copyright laws that allow the estate to effectively ban books for 95 years are unconstitutional though they'd probably need a different Supreme Court to have a chance of winning and actually making the "science and useful arts" clause mean something again. It would probably be ill-advised to even attempt a challenge to copyright law on these grounds with the current court as it could lead to another bad precedent like Eldred v. Ashcroft (the "perpetual copyright is constitutional if Congress extends the terms every 20 years via Mickey Mouse Protection Acts" case where the FSF filed a brief in support of the plaintiff). I think a more productive course of action would be to use the right wing outrage over this to push for an "abandonware" exception to copyright law (basically a "keep it in print or lose your copyright" requirement) and possibly copyright term reduction. Given that the political party that is traditionally more supportive of corporate interests is now furious about corporate censorship, there is now a golden opportunity to roll back corporate power and those on both sides who share that goal (albeit for different reasons) should work together for the greater good.

"Exclusive Right" means exclusive. Period. If I don't have the power to distribute my work how I see fit, including not at all, then I don't have exclusive control over my work, and that's going to make me think twice about publishing it. How does taking control away from authors promote the progress of science and the useful arts?

You're reading it the other way around. Copyright is an abridgement of the first amendment right to publish anything you want, and it is only permitted as long as it exists to further science and the useful arts. Thus, it could be argued that copyright itself should not extend to the right of completely banning a work from being published, as it is hard to claim that promotes the progress of science.

So in essence, you could aim the current copyright law is inconsistent with the constitution.

I am not a legal scholar so I have no idea how naive this argument might be from a constitutional law perspective. I have a feeling it would be pretty naive, to be honest.

I just don't see how one could argue that "exclusive Right" means anything other than exclusive. The intent behind the copyright clause is that when authors have exclusive control over their work, they will be incentivized to produce more. When you start carving out exceptions to their exclusive right, well then it's open season on what control they have, as "exclusive" can no longer be interpreted as to mean the plain understanding of the word.

Let's move away from the Dr. Seuss example and look at another instance of where artists have used their exclusive right to restrict distribution of their work. In 2015 the Wu Tang Clan produced a single copy of their 7th album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin". The album itself then went on a tour of its own and was showcased at museums until it was eventually sold to the infamous "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli for $2 million. The contract he had to sign included the following genius clause:

"The buying party also agrees that, at any time during the stipulated 88 year period, the seller may legally plan and attempt to execute one (1) heist or caper to steal back Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, which, if successful, would return all ownership rights to the seller. Said heist or caper can only be undertaken by currently active members of the Wu-Tang Clan and/or actor Bill Murray, with no legal repercussions." [1]

The legend behind this album has now birthed a forthcoming Netflix documentary [2]. So here is a situation where the author's exclusive control over their art has birthed not just a documentary, which is art, but a legal document which I would classify as art. None of this would be possible in a world where an author's exclusive copyright doesn't exist or could be infringed if they choose to restrict distribution of their work. So I would disagree with your conclusion that it's hard to claim that restricting the distribution of work doesn't "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/bill-murray-can-legally-steal-the-2-mill...

[2]: https://www.engadget.com/netflix-martin-shkreli-wu-tang-albu...

Bank robberies produce an order of magnitude more art than a strange contract that happens to contain stipulations relating to exclusive distribution. That doesn’t mean we should perpetuate them.

Bank robberies are violence. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I'm getting at your support for the claim that copyright fosters the creation of new art with a novelty contract that has a provision in it supposedly allowing for stealing the work back spawning content on it because of its notoriety, mostly because it has nothing to do with copyright.

The only reason the contract can exist is copyright. There are others arguing on this thread that if a rights holder restricts the distribution of their work they should effectively forfeit all control over their work. They have justified their position by saying restricting distribution fails to promote the creation of art. I’ve argued the opposite case and brought examples, and it all comes down to the phrase “exclusive rights” in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution.

>The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.

They're not deciding which ideas are allowed or banned.

They're not stopping anyone else from creating, espousing, publishing any other ideas at all. There's thousands of publishers, and even the very biggest only hold a tiny fraction of the publishing market, so this complaint seems quite overblown.

Should a publisher be forced to publish things they choose not to? I'd prefer not. There's plenty of others. And the internet makes it easy to post any ideas you choose, vastly easier than at any point in history for individuals to make their ideas available to billions of people.

> To me, this is just like a mature author that wants to stop the sale of an embarrassing early book because it was poorly written.

Dr Seuss passed away in 1991, about 30 years ago, so he isn’t capable of being embarrassed any more.

> In this case, the rightsholder thinks the early books are in poor taste and no longer wants them associated with the brand.

This is an incomplete story. The company convened a panel of outside "experts" to make these determinations:

> Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that it had consulted a panel of experts including educators in reviewing its catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication of the six titles.

> In a statement to the Associated Press, Seuss Enterprises said it is “committed to listening and learning and will continue to review our entire portfolio.”

https://deadline.com/2021/03/dr-seuss-books-canceled-no-long...

Unlike other so-called "cancel culture" stories, the pressure campaign didn't play out publicly. But the language is the same and strongly suggests that the publisher is deferring to the judgment of outside "experts", hoping this will keep them in the good graces of the increasingly woke publishing and education worlds.

If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works. For example try to get the Sid Meier Alpha Centauri novelizations - they're almost impossible to find, they're out of print (they're expensive as hell on ebay).

It's been a problem for years that there's been so redress available when a publisher either owns an IP and refuses to sell or license it freely, or when an IP falls into unclear ownership and the same basic thing results.

This all has nothing to do with anything political (because these are not being suppressed by a government, and citizens and organizations are free to choose their own speech and associations) and everything to do with just how garbage copyright law is.

> If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works.

You are talking about works that became incidentally unavailable for commercial reasons (not that many people are interested in 22 year-old strategy video games). The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.

Their publisher also didn't "shut down": they delibrately decided to stop publishing these books because they deemed them Politically Incorrect:

https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed...

> “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.

And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.

> (not that many people are interested in 22 year-old strategy video games)

I recently started a game of Alpha Centauri again. Good times.

> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.

As always, the only dynamic considered here by the publisher is money. They have made a calculation that doing this will benefit their bottom line in the long run. That's the free market and the way the system is designed to work. You may not like their decision, but it's their decision to make. That's the freedom they enjoy under our system. You have the freedom to complain about it and no one will stop you, but everyone is free to act however they best they see fit.

> And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.

eBay has not decided this. They have no power to decide this for you in our free market capitalist system. They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise. If you own the book you are still free to sell it to anyone you want. eBay is not going to help you though, and forcing them to do so would be against free market principles.

The free market gets distorted under monopoly conditions.

If I'm Disney, and I own millions of works, I can start banning some of them on a whim. My bottom line won't be meaningfully affected.

> They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise.

It was the legal right (duty, in fact) of Soviet commissars to vet any book before publication. The net effect was book-banning.

Just because something is legal doesn't mean it won't lead to catastrophic consequences.

Standard Oil's complete monopolistic takeover of the US oil market was also legal at its time. Then we decided we can't live with these results and made laws against them.

I don't know why you are blurring the lines between "single publisher decides to stop publishing book", "mega conglomerate decides to stop publishing media", and "authoritarian government vets all books before publication".

The topic of discussion is a single publisher making a decision for themselves. You are all the way over in Soviet land talking about book banning and government censorship. None of that is happening, and the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining. Anyone in this country is free to write, publish, and sell works with content identical to those in the books Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing, as long as they don't have images and words similar enough to violate their copyright. The ideas contained within are not banned by any government or monopoly.

> the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining

I had a great chuckle at this.

The issue that is being tossed into a big pile of other issues is simple. Ebay, a private company, has taken the path of banning the sale of those now-discontinued books. This action is totally within their rights and is fully legal for them to do. You can, rightly, talk about the content of _this specific book_ as much as you want, but that's not the broader issue here. What is riling up some people is the idea that in the US we are, ostensibly, a country founded on freedom and they feel like that freedom is being encroach upon. You seem to feel like them banning the sale of the book is no big deal, but they are in a large market position and them preventing the secondary market sale has a large impact.

The even bigger issue is that what we are seeing are very vocal groups that push the idea that we have to prevent these kinds of thoughts from being in our society at all. They force these ideas onto the greater community as a whole by attacking any entity they deem as non-compliant. As a result you have companies preempt that attack and voluntarily comply. To use the theme from the previous poster, they are voluntarily banning or self-censoring. This _is_ an attack on freedom though. You cannot have freedom of speech if you make it so only the speech you _like_ is effectively allowed. And I purposefully said effectively and not legally.

This obviously doesn't get into the broader topics of corporate censorship. I have many thoughts, some of them conflicting, about that as a whole. The simplest distillation would be that as long as your free speech is not encroaching into illegal territory then I don't feel like you should be excluded from society, even if your communications are repugnant.

So, back to where this started. You claim the 'slope isn't nearly as slippery' as they were imagining. Perhaps today that is the case. Maybe it's the same next week or next year. At some point the thoughts being attacked may very well align with your personal beliefs and _then_ the shape of the slope will be drastically different _for you_.

The books are not being banned. You can still give money in exchange with anyone who has copy they're willing to sell. It's just that the Seuss estate and eBay have both decided they don't want to be involved in the transaction.

And "Politically Incorrect" is sure a gentle way of describing the content. Maybe you should quote the line from the article you linked which describes some of the "politically incorrect" bits? Or do you recognize that they're actually pretty offensive. I sure wouldn't want to use my printing equipment to print copies of that "Politically Incorrect" book either, and I'd have a problem with the suggestion that someone should be able to force me to.

> And "Politically Incorrect" is sure a gentle way of describing the content. Maybe you should quote the line from the article you linked which describes some of the "politically incorrect" bits? Or do you recognize that they're actually pretty offensive.

President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:

https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/barack-and-michelle-obama-prai...

But now the Woke Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all instructed to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.

To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

By my count, there are somewhere in the range of ~70 Dr. Seuss books (I'm too lazy to count, and that's more than enough for my point). They've stopped publishing six of them. That's less than 10%. He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great, both versions (there might be a third now, who can keep track).

People making a big deal out of the cancelling are blowing it into a far bigger thing than it is. He's not being cancelled, those works are just being recognized as offensive. There's no gotcha to Obama having praised some of his books, because those books are still worthy of praise.

"What's the problem banning a few controversial books? We still publish thousands of books we deem acceptable!"

> He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great

You are clearly in favor of banning ideas you disagree with. Nice to see you are fine with the publication of books when you approve of their "message".

You keep saying "banned", but they aren't. I agree banning ideas is bad, but that's not happening here.

If an idea can't be communicated, for example because books carrying it are systematically cancelled, then that idea is being banned.

This is what happens when Amazon, for example, bans books that express views of transgenderism with which Amazon employees disagree.

Who is doing the banning? ebay can't can books, and hasn't. The publisher can't ban books, and hasn't. The rights holder can't ban books, and hasn't. Who is doing the banning?

eBay can ban sales of books on its platform, and has done so.

The copyright holder / publisher can prevent any publication of books it holds copyright to, and has done so.

Distributors of books, like Amazon, can stop selling books they disagree with, and have now starting doing that too.

So the answer to your question is: all the above.

Free speech is not the right to force others to repeat your speech. It is also not the right to a loudspeaker or megaphone. Free speech gets you the right to say it, but makes no promises about others being forced to listen, forced to spread it for you or forced to repeat it for you. Don't impinge their freedom in the name of your own.

How is the existence of a book, "... the right to force others to repeat your speech"?

People want the book removed because it exists, someplace - not because someone has a metaphorical megaphone. Let's stop with the metaphors, by the way. This isn't literary critique, or English Literature 301. It's a discussion of censorship. Stopping someone-who-isn't-you from reading a work that has nothing to do with you, is censorship.

> existence of a book

Wait, sorry, is someone confiscating the book? Burning it? Requiring it be burned? Arresting people who have it? Arresting the people who wrote it? Legally compelling the publisher to edit it? Legally compelling distributors not to distribute it?

As far as I can tell, everyone complaining is upset that distributors don't want to tarnish their brand with certain content, and authors and stakeholders have decided that certain content doesn't match their modern brands. None of these are censorship!

As an author, you are free to write dumb things. As a bookstore, I am free to not sell the the dumb things you wrote. That's not censorship.

As a publisher, I am free not to publish the dumb stuff you wrote for you. That's the metaphorical megaphone, in case that is unclear, and no one can force a publisher to give you one.

Again, everything you're saying is legitimate, but it completely ignores the elephant in the room, the big elephant, the monopoly power, the concentrated distribution and unprecedented centralization over the flow of information and broadcast media. Whether it's YouTube, Google search results and playstore access, Facebook, and many more, we are all concerned when a new one is added, such as Ebay.

Yes, we won't be sending people with the naughty Dr. Seuss books to the gulag. No one is saying that. We're concerned about monopoly power combined with wokist ideology.

I wish to see just once someone who makes that argument try to turn it around and apply to something else they don't like to see censored. I'm yet to see it.

The Hollywood Blacklist was completely voluntary on the part of the movie studios which enforced it, a decision of certain private companies not to -- how did you phrase it? -- "tarnish their brand" by collaborating with people suspected of Communist tendencies. It is held to be morally repugnant today, and somehow I doubt you would defend it with the same argument you use in the Dr. Seuss case.

I do defend their right to do that, so let me fulfill your wish, friend. I see a massive distinction between "things I don't like" and "things that should be legally compelled."

I worry about the authoritarian leanings of anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.

The point is the terrible ease of applying a double standard in how you approach an issue.

Some private actor X performs an action Y which other people Z find reprehensible. The action Y is within X's legal rights to perform.

You can focus on how reprehensible Y is and how Z are right to condemn it. Or you could focus on how X should be totally free to do Y if X so desires, even if we don't like Y.

What usually happens is that if you feel Z are right or you wish to support Z or you wish to not be seen as supporting "enemies" of Z, you will focus on condemning Y. It won't even occur to you to emphasize that doing Y is legal; if pressed you'll freely admit it is, but to you focusing on how Y is legal will look like hypocritical attempts to evade the real issue, which is the terribleness of Y.

On the other hand, if you dislike Z or like the "enemies" of Z, you will focus on how Y is legal and how Z's dangerous rhetoric about Y poses a real danger of conflating Y with actually illegal acts. You might or might not agree that Y is terrible, but to you it will seem a decidedly minor concern compared to the dangerous rhetoric issuing from Z.

> How is the existence of a book (...)

The book exists. The publisher's just decided they won't sell it anymore.

Stop misrepresenting facts.

That feels like a personal attack, which is disallowed. In any case, I think you didn't read the article above:

"“EBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an email. New copies of the six books were no longer for sale online at major retailers such as Barnes & Noble on Thursday afternoon, which put eBay among the most prominent platforms for the books to be sold."

> Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.

This is a true statement. His behavior always showed this regardless of what obama said. Unlike your orwellian quote, we're not rewriting history, just changing our tolerances.

Do you have any evidence for that at all, or is this standard counterfactual leftist revisionism?

Also, if Dr. Seuss was always so racist, how come the left embraced him until very very recently?

Are you seriously claiming that all the many people on the left, including Obama, were embracing a clear and known racist as recently as a few months ago?

TLDR: The past accepting something is not indication that the future must or should accept.

I don't really think this is a good-faith argument based on the language of the first sentence, but i'll reply anyways...

Yes the evidence is his clearly documented body of work. He used many racial stereotypes and derogatory imagery. He has images of Japanese Americans, Africans, East Asians, and they all use stereotypes and caricatures that are negative.

I can't speak for "the left" but he was embraced by most people because he was popular and many of his stories and books were benign. Lots of bad behavior was embraced by both left and right Americans throughout history. Past acceptance is not indication that the future must accept.

Yes. I am making the claim that people, including Obama (who is not the only image of the left, and not particularly important figure in a literary sense) were embracing Dr. Seuss. A lot of his more objectionable work is rather unpopular, so its not crazy to think that his supporters did not audit his behavior.

There is no doubt that people were embracing him. There is no doubt that much of his behavior is racist. There is no contraction here. People have embraced bad people before and that is (somewhat) ok as look as society learns and grows and corrects their behavior. This is the learning and growing. A book that sold 7k copies over the last few years is no longer in print because it portrayed people in bad ways.

> it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.

Have you actually seen the imagery? This is not a good-faith characterization of what is happening. The images are just rude racist imagery (saying a chinese person has "slanted eyes" for example) that the IP owners were embarrassed by.

> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.

No, it really isn't. When a book edition goes out of print that does not mean it's banned. If the editor decides not to invest in a re-edit ion that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a book store and it doesn't have a book that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a library and it doesn't have a book in its inventory that does not mean it's banned.

If you lack arguments, please don't fabricate lies and misrepresentations like that. That only makes you look dishonest and desperate to grasp to an argument that even yourself acknowledge has no basis nor merit.

>The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher

I don't see the problem here. The copyright owner's no longer wish to distribute certain items in their intellectual property collection? So? I don't see people concerned that Disney isn't pulling "Song of the South" out of their vault, or isn't streaming it on Disney+.

What's the alternative you want? The government to FORCE artists to publish? FORCE Ebay to list these particular Dr. Seuss books? What the hell?? Isn't that worse?

Disney is a great example. It's a huge copyright owners which owns the rights to numerous important cultural works. They can, very effectively, decide what ideas the American public will have access to.

Yes, this is all legal. However, legally, the commissars of the Soviet Union also had the right and the power to ban ideas, books, works of art, and every form of expression.

The problem is the result: a small elite group of cultural commissars controlling the flow of ideas, and shutting undesirable ideas out of the public discourse and the public mind.

That is how totalitarian regimes are created and maintained.

Incidentally, the "government force" in copyright protection is the protection of copyright. That was done for the explicit purpose of fostering the publication of works, since the American lawmakers could never imagine that there will come a time in which huge corporations will ban books on political grounds.

All the government has to do is to stop enforcing copyright protection for copyright-owners who no longer publish the copyrighted works. Guaranteed other publishers will pick up these Dr. Seuss books, since he is by far the most popular children's books author of our time.

As things stand, bid these books adieu. Your children will not be able to read them.

Except this isn't the government 'banning' anything. And there's never been more access to information. You're just whining.

This is not how totalitarian regimes are created at all. Commissars in the USSR having the power to ban books meant repercussions from the state for reading or distributing those books, and was a clear signal that similar works would meet a similar fate.

The publisher deciding to no longer sell some part of their work is entirely different. It makes no difference to your ability to enjoy a copy you own or to sell it to someone else. Nor does it affect your ability to create a similar illustrated children's book including whatever stereotypes you desire. No one is 'banning' you from doing this, although it might diminish their opinion of you.

This is not how totalitarian regimes were created in the past.

Once expressions of ideas are effectively banned, you are in a totalitarian, oppressive regime. It doesn't matter whether that banning was done by the state or by huge monopolistic corporations: the end result is the same.

Also, in this case, while corporations are leading the way, we also see increasingly loud calls for our government to step in and criminalize some forms of speech, for example those deemed "hate speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

This is really a two-pronged attack on free speech and the free exchange of ideas: in the private sphere, individuals and companies move to effectively ban certain expressions, such as the publication of "objectionable" books. In the public sphere, there are moves to criminalize "objectionable" expressions.

The actions in each sphere reciprocally support each other, and normalize the idea that the free exchange of ideas must be policed and restricted.

It's a poor decision on the company's part, and we are criticizing the decision. No one (reasonable) is asking the government to regulate this. We're merely criticizing the decisions of two private companies, and the social movements which pressured them to do so.

It was public criticism, or the fear of public criticism that led them to make this decision in the first place, so this seems like a perfectly fine line of argument to make. (ie, that this was a poor decision on their part.)

Can you expand on how not continuing to distribute materials with racial representations from a time when skin color determined humanity / slavery is a poor decision?

I do not like to see what I am seeing in this HN thread. I think that not propagating offensive, dehumanizing views publicly seems perfectly wise.

This newfound moral outrage is hilarious. President Obama praised and recommended Dr. Seuss books in an official press release as recently as 2015, his last year as president. Now they are suddenly "outrageous and unacceptable".

I don’t think I used that quote, implied Dr Seuss doesn’t have all time classics without ethical issues, nor acted morally outraged.

I did ask a question. “Hilarious” how you missed that.

if you associate Black people with literal monkeys you are the one that is racist. All the book is explicitly saying is that it would be a good idea to hire a person of African origin to work at the zoo.

This have some logic to it in a child mind because they could assume they would know best how to take care of those animals.

It's obviously a caricature but nowhere does it say African people are animals or monkey. This is all originating from your own racism.

> If you associate Black people with literal monkeys you are the one that is racist

Man, isn't it just fantastic how easily you make my point for me. This is also the viewpoint that Dr Seuss' publishers imagined the public at large would hold, so accordingly they have ceased to publish a book that represents "Africans" with this picture:

https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/content/DrSuess_Board_2.png

So, now you see the issue yes?

Article I pulled the image from: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/six-dr.-seuss-books-will-no...

Edit: I am unable to respond directly. The Africans are the monkeys holding the rod in that picture, that is the entire point of this whole "ceasing publication" business

Where do you see African in this picture all I see is imaginary animals. also link to full page https://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/files/2014/09/IfRanZo... nothing in the text mention the monkey are actual people!

Are you going to say the cat in the hat is offensive for people with Cleft lip ?

The monkeys in that picture were the picture representation of the "Africans" in that book.

Your ridiculous deflection is saddening. You yourself stated the criteria the publisher made their decision under, and now you will act like you have not said it

Edit: the very image you linked shows "the African island of Yerka", where they're retrieving the bird from, and you expect me to believe you can't see the implication that the monkeys in skirts holding the shaped bar the bird resides on are the African residents of that island?

Did you read the book? I just did and did not find the page where it refer to an African Man. I might be wrong or it already got modified in recent copy of the book.

They didnt discontinue all his books, just a couple of older, obscure books, his classics will continue to be read and enjoyed

One of the books they banned, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street", was Dr. Seuss's breakthrough work, and certainly not "obscure". Another, "If I Ran the Zoo", is widely considered among his best.

These are both very much among his classics.

thats just revisionism, i dont remember either of them, and ive never seen anyone reference them until these past few days. after the controversy is over, nobody will miss them

No, revisionism is pretending canonical books like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_to_Think_That_I_Saw_It_on_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo are not important just because you don't remember them.

Nobody will miss these books because they have been erased. Nobody missed banned books in the USSR either.

How are you acting as if a publisher ceasing to generate material that it wishes to ethically distance itself from, executed as a perfectly legal maneuver by a private corporation, is in any way analogous to the USSR's centralized government banning books?

I'm sure some people will miss these books, but for those people they can go ahead and find a collector's copy on a marketplace, use a library which has them, find some other private holder, or use the internet to enjoy them in whatever capacity. This is because these books are not banned by a centralized government, but instead have been selected to cease publication by a private corporation.

They were important to dr seuss as a person and his development as an author, but culturally theyve been eclipsed by his more famous work.

These books arent gone, you can still find them and they are documented for historical purposes, but as a society we have decided that there is no need for them as childrens books. Nobody cares about the hundreds of books that go out of print every year

You are not arguing honestly here. You are just defending this decision by any means you have, honest or dishonest.

The books will be preserved, much like banned books in the Soviet unions typically were preserved, in some government archive.

The millions of readers of our generation, who had access to these books because they were offered for sale, will no longer have access to them.

My parents read these books to me. I will not be able to read them to my children.

"Nobody will miss them" is an incredibly false and irrelevant argument. Nobody "missed" all the books in the Soviet union that were blocked by the commissars and never published. How is that a valid justification for this happening in the US now?

You are justifying book banning, pure and simple, and you are using any available argument, and many dishonest ones, to do it. Ultimately, you yourself don't understand why you do this. You just follow the cancel mob.

I am a member of a minority that is supposed to be offended by these books. I am not. I would bet anything that you were not personally offended if you ever read them, too.

But the Cancel Mob has mobilized and you are mindlessly following, because it is the convenient choice, the easy choice, the SAFE choice.

You’ve devolved completely into Fox News - which is legally not news btw - talking points, and you’ll say others are arguing dishonestly?

This decision - to cease publishing select Dr Seuss books - was taken, with no external pressures, by the private corporation and legal owner of these books.

There is no “Cancel Mob” mobilizing here, except perhaps the right wing one that is acting as if a business is not free to remove some part of their inventory on a whim.

Your analogies to the USSR banning books is completely inappropriate as the USSR was a centralized government banning books. A private corporation is certainly not compelled to produce or sell any product they do not wish to continue to sell, and the books remain legal to possess, sell, or trade because no rights have been infringed by the US government nor any legal actions or pressures issued on this topic.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2059159M/And_to_think_that_I...

I found it for you, free for anyone with an internet connection to read. It was the first result when i googled the name of the story internet archive

This was nothing special, a low volume book taken out of print, politicized by people like you.

Whoa. I just bought a new copy of Mulberry Street a couple of years ago. It was on some end cap display at Barnes and Noble. I have read it to my daughter a dozen times. I hadn’t actually looked at the list of Dr. Seuss books, and assumed they were obscure like people said, but Mulberry Street definitely isn’t obscure.

Maybe its relevant for you, but i dont think many other people share that

Caricature and racism are not identical. I think that would be my primary counterpoint. Just because it's fallen out of fashion to draw people in such caricatured ways, does not necessarily mean that there was any negative or racist intent by the artist. I think this matters quite a bit. Dr. Seuss is not evil because he could not predict where the moral zeitgeist would lead us.

People who actually supported slavery, or Jim Crow, I would say are in fact evil, regardless of whether those views were acceptable in some circles.

You really must pay attention to intent, and this is a major failing of the modern edge of these progressive movements. If suddenly, some phrase quickly falls out of fashion, an I use the old antiquated phrase, it must matter whether I actually had any racist intent. Just the fact that I haven't kept up with the newest moral outrage is not enough on its own.

> Caricature and racism are not identical

Ok, sure, this is a fair point in general, but how is it exactly applicable here?

Let's take the example of "If I Ran the Zoo", since it's one of the only images [0][1] I can find.

The synopsis of the book seems to be a child daydreaming about the animals he would keep at his zoo. Whether or not the "Africans" in this book are one of those animals is not clear to me, but this is a representation of African / Black people as literal monkeys.

How you can try to imply that representing black people as monkeys is not racism, given the hundreds of years of insults in that vein, pseudoscience from slave owners and sympathizers suggesting the same, and indeed all the folk with the moral failings of the time that you suggest who would hold and perpetuate this viewpoint?

> Dr Suess is not evil because he could not predict where the moral zeitgeist would lead us

I completely fail to see how you can infer that a publisher not generating additional copies of prose that has found itself in a morally compromised position implies that Dr Suess is evil, or that anyone thinks that.

Indeed, I believe Dr Suess to have published 60 or more books in his career, so merely 10% of his career publications have been selected to cease being replicated further because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a slaver society's worldview. This is not saying the man was evil or that his works were nefarious, it is saying that science and society have moved us beyond those viewpoints and propagating them further does us no good.

Indeed, I'm not even sure how this is being portrayed as "canceling" or any such thing. A publisher with control over the book rights stopped producing the book rights. Your entire rant is predicated around this being a retaliatory act for perceived evils, but that's incredibly lacking in nuance.

Children develop their worldview thru the mediums of information they interact with, and to for a publisher to refine its selection to prevent children growing up with unconscious cognitive biases that are dated, far outside, and even contrary to mainstream societal views of our time is just a complete non-issue.

[0] image: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/content/DrSuess_Board_2.png [1] article: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/six-dr.-seuss-books-will-no...

>Let's take the example of "If I Ran the Zoo", since it's one of the only images [0][1] I can find.

I was originally going to issue a rebuttal based on my reading of "If I Ran the Zoo." But, it occurs to me that you can't really be very offended if you haven't even read the story. What's there to be offended by? You don't even know the context of the image which offends you.

>I completely fail to see how you can infer that a publisher not generating additional copies of prose that has found itself in a morally compromised position implies that Dr Suess is evil, or that anyone thinks that.

Although I still disagree with the publisher's decision, I take your point here.

>because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a slaver society's worldview

What exactly is a "slaver society?" Dr. Seuss was born in 1904, after slavery was abolished. I doubt he was much of a "slaver," as in "someone who literally obtains slaves."

>Children develop their worldview thru the mediums of information they interact with,

Yes, precisely, and I don't believe it's appropriate that children learn to fear and ban ideas which they find distasteful.

> You don't even know the context of the image which offends you

Excuse me? Those monkeys in that picture are representing African humans. I know perfectly well what I've just seen, because I read the article I linked. Perhaps you have failed to do so?

> What exactly is a "slaver society"? Dr. Seuss was born in 1904

Ok, and the Tulsa Race Massacre was in 1921. State-backed murder of black people for the crime of being successful. The south was clearly deeply unhappy about their loss of slaves and backed a set of increasingly "plausibly deniable" laws over time that were designed to segregate, undermine, and condemn to failure Black people in the USA.

If you really think "slaver society" is an overkill to describe an entire region of the USA with extremely racist ideals towards people they consider slaves, let's instead say "because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a society that wishes they were still slavers". I'm so sorry I was slightly pedantic for you

> I don't believe it's appropriate that children learn to fear and ban ideas which they find distasteful

What kind of horseshit disingenuous representation of the situation is that? These Fox News - not legally a news corporation btw - talking points are so stupid. Once again, just like the "USSR book banning" fear mongering analogy above, you are acting as someone who pretends that a private business ceasing publication of books with societally repulsive views is somehow analogous to "banning ideas".

I hope children grow up and learn that condemning and removing from modern discourse historical or traditional views that no longer match up with the ethical framework of society is the only way we can continue to increase human rights in the face of governments and billionaires increasingly concerned with removing those.

Your framing doesn't follow from your logic in any way, and you don't play with pedantry particularly impressively.

We should probably tone down the temperature here. I don't think we're getting anywhere productive, and it's not looking like we're going to see eye to eye.

For the record, I don't watch Fox news, and I dislike it quite a bit.

I agree, I do not see eye-to-eye with those who, never having commented on how a book publisher manages their inventory and resource allocations, decide that a private corporation ceasing publication of select books with racial epithets they consider dehumanizing is analogous to "banning" of the material in any way.

Indeed, the fact that the first time you've ever hopped into a conversation around book publishing is to decry the fact that a publisher isn't generating more pictures of Africans represented as monkeys distances us even further.

Finally, the fact that you don't think "slaver society viewpoints" persisted in a society that murdered an entire city block of Black people merely for being Black people really hammers home how ignorant you are.

If you do not like Fox News, you should question why you are parroting their ridiculous mischaracterizations of a private corporation's normal business actions.

You and a large number of people feel those views repugnant. That said, there are likely certain views you have, that you feel you should have the right to express freely that a large group of people feel are equally repugnant and offensive. Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas, not a large un-elected ministry acceptability. History shows that wielding the weapon of censorship tends to have a boomerang effect long term and can have other consequence, such as radicalizing people.

On a personal note, when I see groups banning ideas and views I automatically discredit the group and ideas behind the banning. The reason is that if a view truly has merit it should be able to stand up to healthy debate on it's own merits.

> Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas, not a large un-elected ministry acceptability.

I agree with what you wrote here, but if you believe this I'm confused why you would take issue with what happened here. This is exactly what has played out. These books were created and published in an open market. Remember, in free markets there is the possibility of failure. That's what you're seeing right here. The publisher of these ideas have determined that they have failed in the market.

So what's the problem? No "large un-elected ministry acceptability" caused this to happen. It was the marketplace that rejected these ideas, and the publisher didn't want to bear the cost of continued publication, which they are free to do. Everyone involved exercised their individual freedoms in the marketplace. The system is working as intended. Where is the failure?

"These books were created and published in an open market." Sorry, but this is utterly false. The extraordinarily extended periods of copyright-terms enforced by the government make this the very opposite of the open market.

The marketplace hasn't rejected these ideas. The holders of the copyright - a law enforced by the government - have rejected these ideas and no one can oppose them. Because of copyright, no other publisher can publish these books in the marketplace. Ergo - no free market and an effective ban on the books.

You are confusing the particular expression of an idea with the idea itself. There are an infinite number of ways to express the ideas contained within the books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided not to publish. The expression of those ideas has not been banned at all, by anyone. Not eBay, not Amazon, not Dr. Seuss Enterprises, not even the government.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to stop publication of their particular expression of these ideas because the ideas themselves are not popular enough to financially justify their continued publication. That's the method by which the whole system works. Ideas flourish in the marketplace when people support them. When people support an idea, it achieves financial success for those that express it. People who express unpopular ideas difficult to find financial success due to a lack of a support base.

How else do you imagine the marketplace of ideas works, and what exactly do you think happens to ideas that are rejected by the marketplace?

Please don't change the goalposts to "general ideas". The works of Dr Seuss can NO longer be published by other actors without violating the terms of copyright and inviting the full force of law and government and punishment on those who would attempt to do so. Besides, ideas can only be expressed through mediums and when those mediums are banned, so is the expression of ideas.

There is no flourishing of the market place here - it has been implicitly denied. If there were no copyright - you can be bet your years salary that there would be folks willing to publish these books for the audience that wishes to read them.

Remove the copyright - make it a true free market and THEN let's see if your argument that the ideas themselves are not popular enough holds true. Besides your statement of financial justification is utterly false. Dr Seuss tops the list of top 10 children's books.

No, its fascist ultra-left ideology that is responsible for these implicit bans. Some folks want to dictate what other should read - capitalism doesn't even come into the picture.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2019/03/01/dr-seus...

Woooah hang on. Don’t blame the left for the problems of copyright. As a Marxist, I am on board 100% with you that copyright as an idea should be removed from our daily lives. Copyright has no place in leftist ideology, so I have no idea how you are making the connection. As I’ve stated many times we live in a capitalist society, and it’s under the rules of capitalism, at the desire of capitalists, that copyright exists. Capitalism absolutely comes into the picture because capitalism is the system under which all of this is happening. We don’t live in a socialist system so how are you blaming leftist ideology?

And I’m not trying to move any goalposts. In several conversations here I’ve been assured that the actual problem is not the discontinuation of these specific books, but the larger picture wherein under some slippery slope argument the general ideas could be eventually banned outright. But apologies if this is not your position and you take issue with the ability of these companies to control their own IP. I would agree with you there.

But at the same time I also recognize that copyright is built into our Constitution and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. So under that framework, I don’t see anything wrong with what Dr. Seuss Enterprises did. Copyright gives them freedom over the creative works they own. The freedom to distribute and the freedom not to distribute. Without the freedom to not distribute works, the decision to publish any works becomes risky for the author, because it cannot be undone, ever. This is going to have the necessary effect of reducing the number of ideas that are expressed, as riskier ideas cannot be retracted by their authors. After all, this is the general idea behind the concept of copyright and underpins the entire marketplace of ideas.

I have no doubt that if copyright were abolished, others would pick up the unpublished works and attempt to distribute them. But this comes at a cost of time and money. What if they don’t sell enough copies to recoup the effort, and they go out of business, thereby halting publication? What if seeing this failure, no one else takes up the mantle of publishing these books? We are in the exact same situation. Would you say they are banned? Of course not, they have just failed financially, which is what happens all the time to books, and what happened in this case.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises surmised that the continued publication of these books would hurt them financially. As your link indicates, they publish a number of very popular books, but notably none of the books in your link are being discontinued. We already know the ideas aren’t very popular because they don’t sell well as it is. If they were popular, they would be on your list.

Anyway, tldr; don’t blame leftist ideology for the perceived failure of a system of, by, and for capitalists.

> That said, there are likely certain views you have, that you feel you should have the right to express freely that a large group of people feel are equally repugnant and offensive

I highly doubt this. I do not dehumanize others nor believe that likening enslaved races to monkeys is in any way appropriate. Besides, you are discussing free speech here - Dr Seuss in no way had his free speech curtailed. He is dead.

> Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas

This is a meaningless feel-goodism.

Freedom of speech protects citizens against government retaliation or censorship for most categories of speech, notably carving out exceptions for calls to violence / treason etc.. Freedom of speech basically means you can say whatever the hell you want if it's not too overtly tearing at the fabric of society.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence; I can say 2+2 = 5 but that doesn't make it smart. People will call me an idiot, and they have that right.

Freedom of speech doesn't protect authors from not "eternally having their works published by their copyright holders even after the author's lifetime has ended", and that is literally the only thing I can see you arguing for here. A publisher who owns the rights to these books has stopped generating more copies of them. What is wrong with that?

> On a personal note, when I see groups banning ideas and views I automatically discredit the group and ideas behind the banning

So, when you see Dr Seuss' publisher stop generating additional copies of books they believe further ideas and sentiments they wish to have no part of - surely, they are free to do this - you are automatically discrediting what group for this banning, exactly?

Just to be clear here, you have internally discredited the group that says "its racist to depict black people as animals in a zoo"?

Song of the South is a good movie especially for its time (Black representation in film) that Disney destroyed because of its aversion to controversy. Since actual Black people are unpopular in racist America, honest portrayals of Black people are considered offensive, effectively removing Black people and characters from mainstream culture unless they "act white".

Slavery is terrible, and since black people were enslaved, literature about Black American's lives from before 1865 is not acceptable. This is bad.

But what actually is happening? Thousands of books go out of print every week. There are over 50 or so Dr Zeus books. If the heirs of the author and publisher no longer want to sell a handful of them will the vast majority of future American readers care?

I would guess that eventually (if these books are popular enough) they will be edited and brought up to date like Richard Scary books:

https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...

The rights holders can do what they want while they are not in the public domain.

What is wrong is pulling it from stock as well as secondary marketplaces.

What if the Christian or Muslim clerics get to say what books should be pulled too?

> What if the Christian or Muslim clerics get to say what books should be pulled too

As an immigrant from a Muslim country I’m super excited about this. I’m going to ban sex scenes on TV so I don’t have to skip past them.

These are all arguments that would support book banning in the Soviet union and all similar totalitarian regimes.

"Thousands of books go out of print every year, so what's the problem with us banning these specific books for political reasons?"

"Does it really matter that we banned these dozens of books? Thousands others were not banned, and are available to the Soviet reader at the nearest bookstores!"

This is a slipper slope, and we're already sliding quite deeply into it. Amazon just banned a book about transgenderism that it considered "offensive":

https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal

This is clearly the Soviet case: it's not banning a single book, it's banning the ideas that it presents, for being Politically Incorrect. Once the book is unavailable, American readers will not have access to these ideas anywhere. Any other book presenting these same ideas will also be banned on the same grounds.

This is precisely what was happening in the Soviet Union and similar totalitarian regimes that banned "forbidden / politically-incorrect" ideas.

You have to know there is a difference between a private company not selling a bigoted book, and a government banning all books which criticize it

So if our lives are effectively controlled by huge corporations, then we should accept that simply because they are technically companies and not the government?

The solution to that problem is to break up monopolies that have too much power.

No, and we should criticize how companies allow access to their platforms, but just because something was denied access to a platform doesnt inherently make it a free speech issue

This is not fighting corporations, this is getting bogged down in culture wars

We know. But you also know, if there are monopolies, even if they are private, they can meaningfully limit the flow of ideas in a way that is highly problematic.

And the term censorship is broad, and isn't specific to private entities versus government. Just because we don't have a Soviet-style government (good), doesn't mean that automatically everything is free and open. If I buy out all of a particular work of art and burn it in a bonfire, I've committed censorship. If not illegal, it should at least elicit some moral eyebrow-raising, no?

everyone keeps saying this, but ive yet to see the numbers that prove ebay is a monopoly, especially since the books are available for free online

> The reality is that these books will not be accessible to the vast majority of future American readers.

Considering they were not that popular to begin with, it seems like only a few thousand Americans would really be without access.

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